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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22621045">you were always gold to me</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental'>limerental</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ex Con Geralt, Falling In Love, Good Parent Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mentioned Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Plant Metaphors, Run-On Sentences, Self-Hatred, Swanky Greenhouse Owner Jaskier, Tenderness, greenhouse au, it's ostensibly a greenhouse au but barely, my god the run-ons</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 08:27:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,064</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22621045</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/limerental/pseuds/limerental</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Their hands clasp together on the pillow, and Geralt can almost visualize it, the golden spill of Jaskier up through his veins, sinuous and explosive and all-consuming. Slivers of gold knit right into his oozing, viscous, shattered places, and he can do nothing but turn his face toward this blinding sun of a man and breathe into the flex of his shoulder.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After spending ten years behind bars for getting caught up in the wrong crowd while trying his hardest to be a worthy father to his little daughter, Geralt takes up a job at a swanky garden center owned by the bubbly and charismatic man of many yellow flower names. They rest, they say, is just gravity.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>128</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1838</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>you were always gold to me</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>guess who wrote this straight through in 7 hours and that's just who i am now i guess and it's these boys' fault</p><p>warning for referenced use of the f-slur</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He's released right on the cusp of the new year, which seems funny and fitting, like a cosmic joke. Post-holiday, the whole world feels stuck in a weird, half-paused blur like life hardly makes sense anymore and time is slippery and a year could pass in the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's not just him feeling like that, tossed out in a world that's gone on without him.</p><p>On a shuttle trip from the temporary housing they've put him up in to the drug store, he stands a while just looking up at the rows of flickering, fluorescent lights stretching out forever, feeling detached from his body like he's watching himself in a black and white film, and then he buys toothpaste, bar soap, and a little stuffed horse with a white blaze for Ciri from a turnstile near the checkout. He realizes only when he's back in his bare room with the plush toy sat on top of his dresser that <i>fuck shit</i>, Ciri's fifteen now, she's practically an adult, and who even knows if she still likes horses and what fifteen year old wants a stuffed toy from her deadbeat father anyway.</p><p>What a fuckin' lark. <i>Hey Ciri, sorry I missed ten years of your life, here's a goddamn horse plushie.</i></p><p>He sits down hard on the bed and thinks how this place isn't so different from being behind bars, not really, and he's still sitting there looking at the dumb stuffed horse when Yennefer arrives, dressed for court, her smart heels clicking on the cold, wood floors. </p><p>“Hey Geralt, how's things?” she asks, sees the little horse and gives him one of her pitying smiles. He thinks maybe in some other universe she's someone he would have fallen head over heels for, seeing how she's beautiful, sharp as glass, and knows what's rattling in his head even with how few words he manages. They've been intertwined for years, ever since she took up his case, and he thinks he loves her, just a little, like Stockholm Syndrome, like a caged man stumbling out toward the smell off the sea. (<i>If I'd had your case from the start,</i> she always says. <i>You'd never have ended up in here at all.</i>)</p><p>But it's just professional, if she takes a vested interest in him it's because she's dedicated and stubborn and not willing to lose a fight, and she probably looks that way at all her clients, all lavender-soft like a fresh breeze. He may never see her again after this. </p><p>“I've found work for you, if you're interested,” Yennefer says and touches his arm. “With lodging.”</p><p>“Hmm,” he says and what he means is <i>thank you</i>. Her lips are stained mauve and there is a smear of kohl at the corner of her eye, and he thinks what it would be like to kiss her, just once and then he holds the thought up in his mind's eye and stomps it to death and drags it to the black, sickly core of him and dumps it. He feels buoyed by cold and guilty gratitude, a sinking thing that settles deep because he is stilted and damaged and undeserving and he will disappoint her and yes, the kind of man he is, she will probably see him again.</p><p>-</p><p>The work Yennefer finds him is at a swanky garden center right off the turnpike, the exit ramp half-curled around it so he can look out over the whole thing from the back of the cab as the car swings along the arc of the road. </p><p>A little jumble of buildings and greenhouses and barns sits folded half into a hill with a crowded parking lot stretched along the main road, flags and fairy lights strung from poles flapping in the winter wind, and standing tall at the center, a structure that seems to be made only of metal curly-cues and frosted glass. The tall fronds of palm trees skirt the elaborate roof, smeared by the fog of condensation.</p><p>A chestnut-haired woman wearing an apron meets him in the slush-slick parking lot and shakes his hand with a thin smile and ushers him inside for a tour. She's Yennefer's old friend, Triss, though when Yennefer says “friend”, it's always a funny word for someone she met once and filed away as <i>useful</i>. </p><p>The place is ostensibly a garden center, previously a humble farm market and country store on the edge of some nowhere town before they put in this exit on the turnpike and before the owner's son swept home years ago from the city to take over. Now the farm market is an organic grocery store and the country store is a swanky boutique and the newly-constructed glass conservatory is half cafe and half banquet hall, and the production greenhouses and orchards clutter up the hills behind it all like an afterthought.</p><p>Triss leads him through the glass structure, humming with the noise of patrons at this hour of the morning. They sit on stools at tall metal tables and curved benches amidst sweeping greenery, little artsy vignettes of rusty statues and chipped-paint furniture and sprays of flowers scattered about while they cradle their fancy espressos and nibble on artisanal sandwiches and avocado toast. Most of the central space is open, the floor a mismatched cobblestone that seems ripe for twisted heels, interrupted with drains so the irrigation water from the plants has somewhere to piddle away, and right at the middle of it all sits a massive, gaudy, obscenely rococo, gold-limned fountain, bubbling out sprays of water that shift color under a light display.</p><p>Geralt is, as they say, mildly overwhelmed.</p><p>Two pairs of swinging double doors sit at the back of the cathedral-like glass structure, one that says <i>cafe</i> in slippery cursive that is hardly legible and the other that says <i>plants!</i> with a veiny leaf shot with holes serving as the dot for the exclamation point.

</p><p>Triss leads him through that door and into the humid hum of a more utilitarian row of attached greenhouses, and there, he is introduced to the man behind it all.</p><p>“Julian Pankratz,” says the slender fop of a man as he extends an arm in a sweeping motion. It takes Geralt a moment to register it as an attempt to initiate a handshake, and he clasps the offered palm, wrist tilted at an awkward angle. “But most everyone calls me Jaskier.”</p><p>The metal tables around them are piled high with stacked pots of soil, some freshly-planted with little nubs of seedlings and some still sitting empty, and despite the fact that it appears this man is the one who has been doing the careful work of coaxing the little plugs of roots out from their plastic trays and down into the soil, he has not a lick of dirt on him.</p><p>He's maybe thirty something, a wrinkle of crow's feet at the edge of his eyes and a wisp of grey at his temples easily overlooked in the wake of his bubble of youthful energy. He half-skips more than walks, and his voice has a lilt to it as though he could sing in the next breath. </p><p>As Jaskier eyes him with a coquettish glint in his eye, Geralt resists the grimace at what he must see. </p><p>Geralt has always been tall and broad and stupid-looking, which he supposes is what got him sucked into unsavory shit in the first place, because it's hard to look at him and not think <i>now that's a nasty brute there</i>. Born with a nose that looks like it had been broken a few times straight out of the womb and the kind of figure you only saw on hulking henchmen in action movies, all thick-necked and gorilla-armed. </p><p>If anything, he bulked up in his decade behind bars and within the first few years, his hair grew long and faded to a shock of premature grey and that did nothing to quell his ugly, brutish aura. Not even the little red heart tattooed on his upper arm, the delicate swirl of his daughter's name held inside, could soften the intimidating bulk of him, mostly because he growled at anyone who dared ask about it.</p><p>Point being that he looks old and mean, like one of those big-jowled, tattered-eared fighting dogs you see on sad humane society commercials, and there's no earthly reason why Jaskier should look at him like <i>that</i>, with such brazen, flirtatious glee.</p><p>But Jaskier does look, his hip cocked and their hands still fitting together in this bastard something of a handshake, and Triss rolls her eyes and skedaddles on out of there, and the man's teeth are so blinding white it could give Geralt a headache.</p><p>“Come on, you big lug, let's see if you're any use to me,” he says and twirls on his heel to put Geralt to work.</p><p>-</p><p>Geralt is put up in a rusty trailer along the ridgeline, like they want to keep his lot as far from the main complex as possible, nothing but a tangle of brush between him and the turnpike. At night, semis rumble the thin walls and headlights tip skewed shadows across them and he thinks he'll never be able to sleep without the sound of diesel engines drumming into his skull ever again after this.</p><p>A few other trailers huddle around the place, but it's still the off-season and he's the only one up here for the moment. Jaskier, meanwhile, lives in a quaint, family farmhouse at the edge of a rolling drive lined with oak trees and skirted by a cow pond that steams with mist in the morning. It's just a short jaunt down a brown field from Geralt's place, and he can sit out on his cinderblock stoop and almost peer right in the back windows. He doesn't do this, of course, because the wind is far too biting for stoop-sitting and because he is not a massive creep.</p><p>Or he is only a little bit of a creep, because watching Jaskier is easy, watching Jaskier could become a habit. He's fluid and he's animated and he's hard not to notice, not with his bright-eyed laughter and his full-bodied gestures and his gaudy collection of winter scarves and hats and the way he says Geralt's name like he's an old friend.</p><p>Work this time of year is mostly hauling heavy things about and operating heavy equipment and filling plastic pots with soil for the coming growing season and re-organizing cluttered storage sheds. There's going to be a wedding held here late January and another in February so Jaskier has him scrubbing worn pews in the barn and dusting cobwebs out of every nook and dragging artwork and benches and statuary here and then only to frown at the arrangement and wave his hand and make Geralt move it back again.</p><p>When Jaskier first asks him if he can drive a forklift, Geralt laughs, because that seems like all he did ages fifteen to twenty something working at the shipyard, puttering about in all weather pushing pallets around. Though that was before the boss approached him on an overnight shift and said <i>hey son so I heard about that situation you're in, that girl you knocked up and I'm sure you're pressed for cash and you know, I got some extra work for you if you'd like, if you can keep quiet about it, I mean, you look like the type who can look tough and stay quiet, you do know what I mean, right, son?</i></p><p>“Oh that's right, you worked for that drug trafficker,” says Jaskier, like it's nothing and then, “you have a very nice laugh, did anyone ever tell you?”</p><p>It makes some shriveled part of Geralt's heart feel like it could lurch into life, and he thinks <i>oh shit</i> what a stupid, silly thing to happen to an ugly bastard like him, going and getting butterfly-stomached and gooey over something as feather-soft and prim and pretty as Jaskier. How cliché, how maudlin. He aches to chuck himself into the muddy cow pond and drown for real, but he thinks maybe Jaskier would just dredge him up, all putrid and stinking and cluck his tongue at him and that would not help his situation at all, not even a little bit.</p><p>So Geralt decidedly does not peer right in Jaskier's back windows (which sounds far naughtier when mumbled out loud like a mantra <i>do NOT peer in the man's back windows, you filthy beast, you brute, you animal</i>), except that one mild day, he does go out on his stoop and finds Jaskier in the windows of the farmhouse peering back up at him and what happens next, as they say, is just gravity.</p><p>-</p><p>No one actually calls him <i>Jaskier</i>, not really. Most call him <i>Julian</i> or occasionally <i>Mr. Pankratz</i> or wayward sales people trying to make a pitch sometimes call him by his father's name by mistake, thinking he still runs the greenhouse and isn't put up in an expensive nursing home an exit away on the turnpike.</p><p><i>Buttercup</i> is a common one, supposedly a childhood nickname. Some say <i>Dandelion</i> with exasperated fondness and some say <i>Marigold</i> and some seem to come up with a whole new yellow flower name every time they see him, until they've exhausted the whole golden, botanical retinue and then they go back to <i>hurry up, buttercup, time's a-wastin'.</i> </p><p>And Geralt doesn't really get the joke, thinks the man isn't much like any flower at all. Jaskier is feminine, sure, and always smells perfumed even in the bog-sweat of the greenhouse, and he has a delicate way about him, from the fine bones of his wrist to the flounce in his step, always a moment away from a skip and a dramatic flourish. </p><p>But for all he looks lean and thin and a little limp-wristed, he is unflinching and stubborn and can hoist a six foot palm tree on each hip while redecorating the glass house with barely a grunt of effort and most damning of all as to his baffling toughness, he never once shows any fear of Geralt, not even a smidgen.</p><p>No, Geralt doesn't understand the long string of nicknames inspired by yellow blooms, but he calls him <i>Jaskier</i> anyway, one of the only ones who does and he doesn't speak much at all but he does whisper <i>buttercup</i> sometimes against the shell of Jaskier's ear just to feel the man shiver and he does drawl <i>dandelion</i> if he wants to catch him off guard and fluster a blush onto his cheekbones.</p><p>It's only later when he's got Jaskier arched above him in bed, hair touched in an almost halo by the afternoon sun coming in through the sheer curtains that Geralt finally understands. He touches a hand to Jaskier's belly to feel the breath expand under his palm and thinks <i>every word for him is golden.</i> Molten. Dripping sunlight. </p><p>Geralt leans up to drag his lips along the jut of his rib cage and tries not to feel like he's leaving oily streaks behind, tainting this downy thing with the bubbling tar pit muck of him. The disgust is a weighty, inevitable pain in his gut.</p><p>-</p><p>Geralt was twenty-three when he knocked up Ciri's mother, and it wasn't anything special, just him being in the wrong place at the wrong time really. But she wanted to keep it and Geralt wanted to do right by her, and so, he was there at the hospital when Ciri was born, a little pink screaming tuft of white hair whose fingers couldn't wrap halfway around one of his big fingers. </p><p>He watched the wrinkled thing twist its face up, looking like some kind of cross-eyed potato with blue-veined, kicking frog legs, and he felt all his insides re-arrange into something that could do nothing but helplessly, desperately, disastrously love this little girl.</p><p>Even so, Pavetta's stern-faced mother looked at him like he was some nasty, sticky piece of garbage she had found on the bottom of her shoe and Pavetta soon had some knight in shining armor she wished was Ciri's father instead, and Geralt saw his daughter some weekends, some spare change moments at the park pushing her on a swing or at the ice cream place hoisting her on his shoulders.</p><p>She squealed when he tossed her in the air and giggled as he spun her in circles and extended grabby palms for him when he finally set her down. And the times she welled up with tears when he had to go on his way after a few hours swelled his heart almost to the point of detonation.</p><p>It drove Geralt to work longer hours just to send bigger checks and then, it drove him to take his boss up on his offer of new and unsavory jobs he would have balked at before. His life had somehow ended up neatly-sectioned into <i>Before Ciri</i> and <i>After Ciri</i>, and he didn't hesitate. Mostly, it was easy and not so dramatic. He just drove trucks here and there and stood in menacing, hulking silence in the corner of the room while men met for what could have been ordinary business meetings if not for the rolled wads of cash and the late night hour.</p><p>One chilled morning, Jaskier taps at his tattooed bicep and hums and asks <i>who's Cirilla?</i>. Geralt hasn't slept in the trailer since the first week. He's about to slip out of the warm cocoon of wool blankets to go start the coffee but stalls instead.</p><p>“Hmm,” he says and has to beat back the instinct to growl <i>none of your business</i> that he honed sharp in prison. Jaskier has the blankets rucked up around his chin, rolled on his belly to look at him, all sex-mussed and sleepy-eyed. “My daughter,” Geralt says. “She's fifteen now, I think.”</p><p>“Oh,” says Jaskier and draws his thin arm back under the cover. “Have you seen her yet? Since you got out?”</p><p>“No,” he says. </p><p>He thinks of the little stuffed horse from the drug store sitting in sad repose on his dresser. Thinks of all the times during that first week in the halfway house that he scrounged up the courage to stand in the lobby at the phone and listen to the line buzz and buzz until he finally fumbled the cursed thing back into its cradle before someone on the other end could get unlucky enough to answer.</p><p>Ciri was hardly out of diapers the night her loving parents went out on the harbor with friends to watch the fireworks fizzle over the water and didn't make it back to shore. Never found the bodies. Hushed, cruel rumors that they didn't tip drunkenly from the boat and drown but cut out and ran and didn't look back.</p><p>Geralt can still hear Calanthe over his tinny cell phone speaker saying <i>”she's coming home to stay with me. Don't come visiting. Just forget about her.</i></p><p>But of course, she didn't say <i>stop sending checks</i>. No, she still expected those, nice and regular.</p><p>So, he took more jobs, he worked late in sleazy parts of town, and his hand twitched to the small of his back on instinct even when he was off the clock and not carrying a gun. The first time he split his knuckles on some posh asshole's face when his boss waved him to it, he puked in the alley on the way home, acrid and steaming. Some nights, he imagined himself as a statue leaning back against the wall in the room while the men talked, arms clasped in front of him, as rigid and unfeeling as solid steel. </p><p>The night things went bad started out ordinary and immediately went to shit, and before he could process how he had gotten there, he was on his knees with a gun to his throat and his hand stinging and he thought of his little girl sleeping warm in a gauzy, princess four-poster up in some big house in the suburbs and he ached and he <i>ached</i>.</p><p>The very last time he saw Ciri, it was one month since the drug bust that ground his career and his life to a dizzying halt, a week since his trial, a day or so since his final sentencing. Ten years was the verdict, and he met Ciri in a white-washed visitor's room, handcuffed to the table because his assault on that undercover cop marked him as a <i>violent offender</i>. </p><p>She wore a bubblegum pink dress glinting with sequins and hard plastic dress-up shoes and held her grandmother's hand, and Geralt said <i>hey little cub, I'll miss you every day. I'll see you in a bit maybe. Love you. Be good.</i></p><p>And Ciri blinked like she didn't even know him and was swept out of the room and that was that, that was the end of it.</p><p>“I think you should try and see her, darling,” Jaskier is saying, and then he makes a wounded noise in his throat when Geralt presses his face down into his scarred hands and begins to shake. Jaskier coos and wraps himself, blankets and all as best as he can around Geralt's broad back and the tender little lullaby he sings into his hair could break his chest right open, could drag all his flailed, charred bits out into the harsh light, could destroy him, already has.</p><p>-</p><p>They work together the way they make love, synchronized, hardly needing a word to follow in step behind the other. Or at least, Geralt hardly needs a word, because Jaskier supplies them all.</p><p>The wedding in January goes well and the one in February also. Geralt is swindled into a tuxedo for the occasion and Jaskier peacocks in something silky all over and turquoise and trimmed in lace. The whole glass conservatory is transformed into a tafetta-swathed banquet hall, the main greenhouse into a pew-lined sanctuary strung with hanging ferns and fairy lights. </p><p>Geralt doesn't know if it's the wine or the copious bacon-wrapped scallops that make his stomach twist with nausea or if it's just watching Jaskier flit about from table to table to guest to bride to groom. He looks gaudy and liquid-soft and utterly ridiculous, and Geralt wants nothing more than to pin him down against the lip of the ornate, central fountain and see if his silk shirt goes translucent under the spray of the water and see if he looks just as joyful and alive with Geralt's hips pistoning slick between his thighs.</p><p>It is a possessive, sickening, greedy hunger, and after the guests have been shuttled off to their hotel and the staff have petered away, Geralt's just tipsy enough to be led by the hand into the dim glow of the greenhouse and to drop hard to his knees in the gravel with hardly a suggestion. Jaskier tips back in the front pew, the string lights that sway among the ferns above shadowing the round 'o' of his open mouth as Geralt noses against the line of his crotch and mouths him wet through bright silk.</p><p>He can't get his fingers to work and instead of a fly Jaskier's pants have some kind of archaic lacing that tightens the more he fumbles, so he gives up and laps at him like that, tongue dragging flat along the taut flesh just a breath of fabric away and what do you know, it does go translucent.</p><p>Jaskier breathes through his nose and ruins Geralt's neatly-tied hair with a tug and it's obscene even disregarding the wide splay of his hips, it's obscene just the insistent way he whispers Geralt's name when he stills and arches and stains a darker bloom of fabric along his crotch, it's filthy, it's objectionable, it's--</p><p>It's very hard not to remember in sensual, visceral detail while helping to lug out the pews with the rest of the staff the next day, and it's very easy to stir back into life later in their bed. And Geralt thinks, in that hazy place post-orgasm, <i>I was made to prostrate myself before him. I was made only for this.</i> </p><p>And if he is awful and no good at most everything else, that at least, he can take pride in.</p><p>-</p><p>After that, spring picks up and it's the growing season and suddenly, Geralt finds himself elbow deep in soil and perlite and bits of granule fertilizer half the time. He walks down the hill to work through a late blizzard and is drenched in sweat by early morning as the sun streams through the glass panes of the greenhouse. </p><p>Jaskier, for all his perceived poshness, most days works side by side with his employees in the damp, soil-strewn, sweat-muggy production house with all the easy experience of someone who's done this since he was a boy. It takes Geralt a long while to ask him why.</p><p>“Why do the work?” he asks while they are bent together at the grower's bench pressing minuscule seeds carefully into the cells of plastic trays one flick at a time. “Because this was my father's place,” he says. “I still feel like if I slack off, he's going to come 'round the corner hollering at me.”</p><p>Geralt can hardly imagine the idea of Jaskier slacking off a day in his life and says so and earns a trill of laughter.</p><p>“Oh, you should have seen me here when I was younger. I hated it. Used to sneak off and smoke hiding behind the bagged soil pallets,” he says. “My father's face when he would catch me, <i>oh boy</i>. I've never seen so many colors on one man's face. And the names he used to call me were slurs I think he invented and popularized himself. Mostly, I was a slacker and a faggot and a waste of space.”</p><p>A little pang slivers into the spaces between Geralt's ribs even hearing Jaskier distantly ascribe those words to himself.</p><p>And then, Jaskier says, I ran away to the big city to get famous, of course.</p><p>Geralt almost asks, stupidly, <i>did you get famous?</i> and then feels very silly for almost asking because he wouldn't be here seeding jalapenos in the dirt with someone like Geralt if he did.</p><p>And then, Jaskier says, well, Daddy got sick.</p><p>“This was almost ten years ago now,” he says. “Can't believe how time flies when you're reinventing the family business and abandoning dreams of stardom, all while finally making up with your pops after all those years.”</p><p>You forgave him even after everything he said, Geralt asks with a <i>hmphhh</i>, and Jaskier smiles in that mellow way that lights him up inside.</p><p>“It took years, but he came around. Started to see me different. We were almost cozy towards the end,” he says. <i>The end?</i> Last Geralt knew, the old man is still alive, bed-bound in a nursing home but not-- “He forgot it all, once he got sicker. Just drained right out of his head back to before I'd come back. I haven't visited in a year or so. Can't stand him looking at me from that bed with that look in his eyes that says he still wants to open his mouth and call me a fag.”</p><p><i>Oh Jaskier</i>, Geralt thinks and makes a gesture with the seeds cupped in his hands that's supposed to mean something like <i>if I wasn't holding a lot of hot pepper seeds right now, I'd smudge those silly tears right off your face and kiss you</i> but probably just looks like a shrug.</p><p>“So I write him a check every month, and that's that,” says Jaskier. “That's all it's ever going to be again.”</p><p>Geralt thinks of Ciri, how he used to write her checks and now writes long, awful letters she won't read and that he doesn't even know where to send. </p><p>Some time later, he is lounging half-asleep in their bed when he snatches low conversation from the living room and clambers up to investigate, stopping on the landing of the stairs when he spies the top of Jaskier's head, hand curled around the phone pressed to his cheek. Someone on the other end is yelling, a sharp stacatto rise and fall of breath, and at the angle he's looking down through the wooden stair-rail, Geralt can't see Jaskier's face when he says <i>I'll be ok here in the city, dad, I'm being safe. Got friends to look after me, and I'm not coming home if you're going to shout things like that. Please be good to the nurses. Please take your meds for me. I love you. Buh-bye.</i></p><p>Geralt pads barefoot down the stairs to the kitchen to press the button on the coffee machine, and then a mug into Jaskier's hands, and then the gentlest kiss he can manage to the mussed crown of his head.</p><p>-</p><p>Somehow, some way, it doesn't all shatter apart or peter out or sluice off like so much water. It's good and it's languid and it mellows into long stretches of days watching the greenhouse swell to bursting around them. The days grow milder and the grass all along the ridge takes on a flush of bright green and then goes sunny with swaying daffodils and most of the grey piles of snow finally melt, even out of the dark shadows on the north sides of the buildings.</p><p>Geralt learns, bent to watch Jaskier pinch off swollen buds with nimble fingers, that sometimes a plant must be pared back, its flowers plucked off and smashed and tossed into the wastebasket, in order to encourage and bring on stronger, more beautiful growth in the future.</p><p>Jaskier tells him also that sometimes a flower does not swell into bloom out of happiness and care but because it's been dealt a shitty, stressful hand and is offering one last hurrah of a sunny bloom in its distress. </p><p>How fitting, Geralt thinks, for a man they call <i>dandelion</i>. </p><p>Jaskier twines like creeping buttercup through the burnt lawn. His rhizomes tangle into any hostile scar of ground they touch, and it's just inevitable that it bursts into life. </p><p>And Geralt thinks, well, if it is Jaskier who is so carefully tending him, bent low to trail his fingers through the wild, dark, lurking parts left in him and tease there at those tight, pinched places, then maybe he can yet send out fresh vines from the rotten wounds and maybe he can yet climb toward the light.</p><p>Spring froths up and spills out, and the greenhouse is a busy swarm of people shopping, laughing, holding hands, taking pictures of one another among the green blur of foliage and shock of brilliant flowers. It's joyful, and it's wearying, and Geralt is still drawn to awe by the boisterous, tireless man that flits here and there and back again and still has the energy at the end of the long, long days to pull Geralt down into their bed.</p><p>Well past dark, his bare skin is white as moonflower, velvet-soft like an unfurling petal, and if Geralt smears him with soot everywhere his fingers touch, then it's just fine, it's alright, because in return, Jaskier weaves gold thread into Geralt's body and maybe it all cancels out. First, with fingers slicked inside of him, crooked to coax him to quivering, and then as the smaller man parts his thighs and slips between them and inside. </p><p>Their hands clasp together on the pillow, and Geralt can almost visualize it, the golden spill of Jaskier up through his veins, sinuous and explosive and all-consuming. Slivers of gold knit right into his oozing, viscous, shattered places, and he can do nothing but turn his face toward this blinding sun of a man and breathe into the flex of his shoulder.</p><p>And if one morning, Geralt mutters <i>love you, Julian</i> into a kiss, it's only because the other man said it first, not out loud, not in words, but said it first all the same.</p><p>-</p><p>Mr. Pankratz dies on a Sunday morning in mid-May.</p><p>Jaskier is at work when he gets the call, and Geralt is helping a woman find the flat of begonias she is searching for, pointing her out front along a colored awning, when he sees Jaskier sit down hard on a spindly, metal bench, trembling hand pressed into his coiffed hair.</p><p>There's no viewing, no casket, just a memorial service in the glass house with the urn up on a table shrouded in waves of tangled flowers, and it is a slow kind of torture seeing Jaskier watery-smiled and tight-jawed and hollow-eyed greeting the crowds of people who loved his father, a lot of whom never loved him.</p><p>They stumble together up the hill to the old farmhouse when it's all over, and it's the first time Geralt has ever seen Jaskier look <i>exhausted</i> like a slight breeze will bowl him over, and he stands in his strange and somber plain, black suit in the kitchen where he grew up and folds into Geralt's arms and weeps.</p><p>“It's unfair,” he croons into his chest, still hitching with sobs. “I have to feel all this, and he got to forget he even loved me.”</p><p>“He loved you,” Geralt says into his hair. “He loved you.”</p><p>And he sweeps the man up and climbs the stairs with him tucked in his arms and they lie in bed the rest of the day, not fucking, not kissing, just lying together as the afternoon cools into night.</p><p>It's still May, it's peak greenhouse season, and so they rouse themselves the next day and go back to work and it's an ordinary day except for the fragile way that it isn't. </p><p>A week later, takeout boxes sprawled on the dining table, beer buzzing warm in their bellies, Jaskier says, “I looked her up. Your Ciri.”</p><p>Geralt freezes in raising chopsticks to his lips.</p><p>“Her grandmother is listed as your next of kin. They haven't moved. We could make a trip of it.”</p><p><i>Who says she wants to see me</i>, Geralt doesn't say. </p><p>“Who said you had the right,” he says instead.</p><p>“No one, Geralt,” says Jaskier, sadly, sweetly. “But I know what it feels like to lose your chance. I don't want that for you. I want anything but that for you.”</p><p>The way he says it is so tender that Geralt can't do anything but forgive him the intrusion and the assumption and the insult and let himself agree to it. It's terrifying and it's rash and it might just break him if it goes sideways and it <i>will</i> go sideways but if he can borrow just one, small, golden tendril of Jaskier's bravery, then Geralt knows it can be done.</p><p>-</p><p>In June, they go to the coast.</p><p>This early in the year, the water is still ice-cold as it tugs at their ankles, and Jaskier gasps and screams when Geralt grabs him from behind and spins him in his arms. It's public and exposed, but they kiss like that with a wave breaking in salty foam around their shins. Geralt's grey hair sweeps down into their faces, and he's getting a tan already and Jaskier's getting a sunburn, and Jaskier touches his cheek with the calloused pads of his fingers and says <i>my god, your face when you smile</i> and Geralt says <i>shut up, buttercup.</i></p><p>They stay in a warped, peach-colored beachhouse with a private boardwalk across the dunes to the edge of the water, and they walk out each morning hand in hand to watch the sun rise and sit on their little balcony while the evening sun pinks up the little stretch of sand, drinking dry wine straight from the bottle.</p><p>When, at the end of the trip, the car finally pulls up at the familiar, big house in the suburbs and coasts to a stop, Geralt realizes with a strange jolt of something that he hardly feels afraid at all, at least not the way he knows he would without Jaskier sitting there in the passenger seat, all soft-eyed and brilliant. </p><p>He leans to kiss the crooked smile off Jaskier's face and knows the truth. No matter what happens now, this is the life he was meant to live. Some things, some bright and yellow things, are worth sinking your roots into.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>follow me on tumblr <a href="http://limerental.tumblr.com">@limerental</a> where you can yell at me about my adjective abuse in this fic</p></blockquote><div class="children module" id="children">
  <b class="heading">Works inspired by this one:</b>
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